Tell that to the people in the car and home where bullets hit. Fortunately, no one was struck by a bullet Monday, but that has not always been the case. Just 13 days earlier, a man was shot in the hip while at Southern Hills Shopping Center. And the day before that, a man was shot at a Kum & Go on West Battlefield Road.

Those are just a few examples of shootings in all directions within the city. While the police department does not keep a tally of drive-by shootings in the city, at least three were reported in May. In March, police were investigating one drive-by when they were called to another just a mile and a half away.

Graphs and charts show that the state's larger cities do have considerably more crime. In St. Louis, which recently earned the dubious title of the most dangerous city in the country, violent crime has been steadily decreasing since 2005. Compare that to the Springfield graph, which shows a steady increase - 44 percent since 2005 while the city's population only grew by 6.75 percent.

Local hospitals have seen a rise in gunshot victims, and despite a positive trend downward in 2009-10, robbery and assaults with firearms were at their highest in Springfield last year - when someone was robbed or assaulted with a firearm in Springfield at a rate of once every other day.

Police Chief Paul Williams explained away some of those statistics by pointing to gangs, who tend to shoot each other rather than innocent victims.

Targeted violence does not make it less serious, and we know that such violence tends to spill over into the community.

If businesses considering locating in our community are telling the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce they are worried about the city's crime rate, as Chamber President Jim Anderson reported in last Sunday's story, then that violence is claiming even more innocent victims. It is interfering with the ability to draw business and jobs to our city.

We learned in another article that ran today that the city's gang members are no longer transplanted from big cities, but are now homegrown, second-generation gang members. This troubling trend is seen in big cities where families are so entrenched in gang culture that it is nearly impossible for youths to escape it.

The city's Gang Task Force, created in 2006 - a decade after the city rang alarm bells over gang problems, identifies trends in gang activity and counts on community awareness to help divert kids from gang involvement.

Williams pointed to media reports, such as Jess Rollins' report on gangs, as the reason people perceive Springfield as having a crime problem.

We believe such reports inform the community so action can be taken to address potential problems.

It is certainly true that Springfield's crime rate does not rank it up there with Chicago or St. Louis, but it is important that we take those numbers seriously.

We should not have to earn a "most dangerous" designation to believe we have a problem or to begin planning ways to combat our consistent, if not remarkable, rise in violent crime in our city.

We understand the police chief's desire to minimize the situation, but it is time to maximize our efforts to combat violent crime in Springfield so that the lines on the graph begin to dip instead of rise.

We will continue to report crime - when it goes up and when it goes down.

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Fight reality and perception

When the police report was released ? a drive-by shooting Monday in northwest Springfield ? it was in eerie contrast to a front-page article on the previous day.